Political heartburn. After two big election night losses in New Jersey and Virginia, some Democrats are beginning to wonder if their party is out of step with the American people.

Republicans won in both states Tuesday night thanks in large part to independent voters – the same independent voters who helped sweep Barack Obama into the White House just one year ago. CNN's Suzanne Malveaux reports.

Ask Pat Dunlavy to give you the defining moment of his long
career at Salomon Brothers—the point in time when he started
to really understand how the firm and the rest of Wall Street
really works—and he’ll tell you the story about “The Great Race
of 1978.” Dunlavy was thirty years old. He was making a good
living as a bond salesman in Salomon Brothers’ Cleveland
office. His customers were predominantly large pension funds
and other institutional investors in the Midwest that bought and
traded bonds. Because of his position, he had contact with
some of the firm’s power players in New York, including the firm’s
legendary CEO, John Gutfreund, and some of the most savvy bond traders he’d ever met, people such as Lew Ranieri and a brilliant and charismatic trader named John Meriwether, known throughout the firm simply as “J.M.”

The Cleveland office occupied one of the largest buildings in Cleveland, fourteen stories overlooking a decaying downtown of abandoned buildings and steel mills. Like most securities firms, Salomon Brothers had its share of loudmouthed former jocks, particularly at its sales and trading desks. Daniel Benton, a salesman and former high school football player, was one of those (though certainly not the worst bloviator of the bunch). Benton was growing tired of being ribbed about his expanding waistline. At one point he made an officewide announcement. He challenged anyone in the office to a race up the building’s fourteen floors. He said he would wipe the floor with any one of them.

On Friday, January 4, we landed in New Hampshire after
4:00 a.m. As we got to the hotel, it was nearly time for the day’s
first conference call, so I skipped sleep altogether. Instead I
checked our online fund-raising numbers; they were through the
roof, with over $6 million raised in the hours since we were declared the winner of the Iowa caucuses. It was like a lit
match had been dropped in gasoline. New donors and fund-
raisers were showing up everywhere, wanting to help a potential winner, and our previous
donors and fund-raisers were digging deeper as their initial investment was rewarded in Iowa.

Obama made it clear from the beginning that he did not want to be left shouldering a big debt. I had always managed campaigns that way, so we had prepared for the worst and had hoped for the best, budgeting conservatively post-Iowa and projecting only $10 million raised for all of January. We assumed that even with a loss we could cobble together enough money through our diehard supporters to execute our game plan in the remaining early states.
Now, we almost certainly would raise over $10 million in the first eight days of January alone and might raise over $30 million in January, giving us what we believed would be a huge financial advantage for Super Tuesday. In the space of a few hours, we had not just won Iowa but also considerably strengthened our ability to compete against Clinton in a drawn-out slugfest.

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